“Besides,” Rosa continued softly, “Goldie had saved my life. I was nearly dead with fever in that house, and she got me out of there and back to where she had water and blankets. More importantly, after that … she became my friend. She shared her food with me, taught me to pick pockets and run scams, and once I shared my quest to hunt evil grundwirgen, she threw herself into finding them for me. She did it with such zeal, as if it were a game, and I—perhaps I thought she was not serious enough about something that had become tantamount to my religion, but it did not worry me. She was so slick, so sure of herself. And I … I idolized her. I would have done anything she asked of me.”
“We are always blind to the faults of those we love,” Hou Yi said.
“Feng Meng?” Rosa asked.
Hou Yi nodded.
Rosa felt no surprise. “He was more than your apprentice, wasn’t he?”
“He was like a son.” Hou Yi’s expression wasn’t visible in the dark. “Not only my son. My—legacy. Like your grandmother taught you … did you teach your daughter your skill with the rifle?”
“I taught Mei.” Reaching across to adjust her elbow, her face dipped behind the sights, so pale and serious and achingly beautiful. That sparking tingle as they touched, like firecrackers under Rosa’s skin. She gently closed the lid on the memory. “Mei taught Xiao Hong.”
They both had, to be truthful, but Rosa could not have been prouder of stepping back and watching Mei repeat those same precious words to a tiny, exuberant, perfect child, the same words Abuelita had given Rosa and Rosa had given Mei and now Mei was passing on in turn, in one long unbroken thread of love.
She felt a deep stab of grief for Hou Yi as if it were her own.
“You understand then,” Hou Yi said. “Everything I was, everything I knew, I wanted to give to him. I felt unbridled joy at his successes. If he had surpassed me, it would have been cause for celebration, but it also didn’t matter that he did not, only that we kept learning, together.”
“But he didn’t feel the same.”
Hou Yi’s silhouette was still in the night, and Rosa was not sure she had heard. But then her shape crumpled, her hands coming up to her face. “Where did I go wrong?” she whispered.
PART THREE
They started early the next morning. The air was cooler today, and the breeze carried a tang of salt. They were nearing the sea.
Hou Yi picked up the thread from the evening before, as if it had been left trailing on the ground in the dark. “You must doubt,” she said, after they had begun their steady hike. “You must wonder if I’ll be too soft to stop him, when the time comes. I don’t know myself.”
Rosa had wondered. She had not yet known how to broach the question. She’d determined to stand with Hou Yi, to be her second, but … what would that mean?
“It’s one reason I didn’t want your companionship, and also a reason I do,” Hou Yi said. “Because you might see me fail. But I might need you to prevent it.”
This was Rosa’s gravest concern. “Do you plan to…” She wet her lips. “What do you plan to do?”
“I don’t know.”
Rosa had never killed someone in human form, though she knew that distinction was only in her mind. More importantly, she had not killed anyone at all since that day long ago when she had betrayed the person she had loved more than anyone in the world. “You saved me, you saved me,” he babbled, groveling at her feet as a toad hopped away, and then she put her rifle to his skull and pulled the trigger.
“I made a promise,” Rosa said. “It’s why I … stopped. A long time ago.”
“I would not ask you to break such a promise. We shall see what we shall see.” Hou Yi coughed. “Perhaps it is a foolish hope, but I still wonder … if I can reason with him. If I can meet him and reach out to him and tell him to come home.”
Her voice was laced with pain. Rosa did not think it very likely, but she also knew she would have hoped the same in Hou Yi’s place, no matter how slim the chance.
“I’d done such terrible things,” Hou Yi continued, almost as if to herself. “That day Feng Meng surprised me in the woods. I had … my position at the time was a very high one, because of the deeds I had accomplished protecting people, and I … after I lost my wife, I wanted them all to feel the same pain. I thought, they only have this world because I saved it, and yet they still clamored for more from me, need, need, need, want, want, want—and I was numb to all but my misery. I made them one with my grief in every way I could.”
Rosa could offer no advice, not when it came to escaping that long shadow of guilt, the one whispering that a bad death was no less than they had earned.
It might even be true.
“Feng Meng had turned from me long before then,” Hou Yi said. “His act was not one meant to protect the people from his former mentor who had gone too far. In fact, he was the reason … but I would still willingly forget it all, if he would. As I might hope the people I wronged may do for me, someday, if they can.”
Rosa would have hoped such a thing as well, but most of the people she had wronged were dead, save two. The two who mattered to her more than anything.
“Tell me about your wife, Flower,” Hou Yi said, as if she had read Rosa’s thoughts. “Your Mei. I hope you and she have a happier ending than mine.”
Their ending had already been written; Rosa was just waiting for the time to run out.
But she did not say that aloud.
* * *
The first time Rosa saw Mei was in a garden.
Rosa had come here to hunt. She’d perched in a blind where she could see over the wall, into this castle where rumor held that a fearsome beast dwelled, a onetime prince who had been cursed from humanity long ago. Holding a princess captive to his depraved needs.
And instead of the Beast, she had seen Mei.
Mei had been so young. Barely more than a girl, and not a princess at all, Rosa found out later—only an unlucky child who had been sold to someone still too royal for the laws to apply to him. She wore her hair loose, and it fell in thick, black waves past her waist. Her skin was so pale that the contrast was striking, black and white, coal and ivory.
Rosa’s sights dipped, and she stopped breathing.
Mei was making a slow circuit of the garden. She reached out and touched one of the roses, a late red bloom. Almost as if she was sorry for it.
The Beast came out.
Rosa had expected a lumbering, ugly thing, clumsy and misshapen. Instead, he was graceful. He moved like a giant cat, his bulk becoming light in his bound across the garden, and he wore the magnificent ermine-trimmed cape of the prince he had been. He whirled through the roses and approached Mei.
Such an overwhelming hate engulfed Rosa that she almost choked on it. She’d never in her life felt such a thing. Her hands went white-knuckled on the rifle.
But then Mei had reached out to the Beast and touched him, gently, with affection. She twisted the red rose from the bush and held it out. The Beast took it and cradled it to his breast, and he bowed his head to her.
Rosa’s hands trembled and hesitated. For the first time, she did not know what to do.